Featured photos

Canada got the last hurrah at the Celebration of Light Saturday evening, closing the three-night event with a winning display. Canada was declared the winner of the event, with Brazil and China finishing second and third, respectively.

Downtown Eastside street cleaners get the pink slip as funding dries up

City mulls whether to continue project that employs disabled people

David Pollitt, far right, cleans the streets of the Downtown Eastside with other members of the Great Beginnings Clean Street Project crew, Mike Blair, left, and Tim Heisler.

Photograph by: wayne leidenfrost
, Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER -- David Pollitt loves his job cleaning up used condoms, needles and other garbage from the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside but he has been told he will be out of work at the end of this month.

Pollitt said he and other street cleanup crew workers from the Coast Foundation Society were told the Great Beginnings Clean Street Project, which employs people with disabilities to keep the sidewalks and lanes clean in the Downtown Eastside, will be cut since funding is no longer available.

The funding was initially provided by a provincial grant but that funding ended in 2012, said Albert Shamess, director of waste management for the city.

Shamess said the city has been paying for the program for the past year and is now reviewing whether to continue it. He said there has been no announcement to cancel the program and it will be up to the city to determine whether grant money will be made available to continue it.

The city’s website brags about the clean streets program as “an excellent example of social sustainability in action. Work crews benefit from a greater sense of pride and self esteem developed through employment that makes a positive contribution to their own community.”

“We do a good job down there. It’s needed. It’s a mess down there,” said Pollitt, who has been working on the crew since 2009, one year after the project started as part of a $10-million provincial intiative to beautify city streets for B.C.’s 150th anniversary and in anticipation of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

“The service is not something you can just abandon. I wonder, what is the city’s plan when we leave? What happens to all the needles, used condoms and garbage? The city claims it’s a green city but you can’t have something green if it’s not clean.”

Pollitt said on a typical day the crew picks up anywhere from 15 to 30 needles, or about 4,000 every year. He added it’s also not unusual for them to find large garbage bags of trash ripped apart in the middle of a sidewalk, which they clean up.

When he heard how city representatives were “basking in the praise” of television mogul Oprah Winfrey’s comments — how she couldn’t find trash in the city — he was irritated knowing the cleanup crew’s contract is ending March 31.

“I wondered what Oprah would say if she came on a tour with us?” he said.

Pollitt added he’s particularly concerned that school students at Lord Strathcona elementary will no longer have the crew working to keep their sidewalks adjacent to the school free of trash and dangerous used needles.

“A mother not long ago stopped me near the elementary school. She was pushing her little girl in a buggy and she wanted me to show her daughter a needle so her little girl would know what not to pick up. The mother told me some little kid had poked himself the previous week,” he said.

Pollitt said up until six months ago the crew was operating seven days a week with six people but recently it was cut back to five days with fewer people.

Darrell Burnham, executive director of the Coastal Foundation Society, said he was told the program was being cut for financial reasons but he wondered why, since it is does so much for the community on a budget of $50,000.

“From our point of view it was a win. The city invests and the community benefits. It allows disabled people to work in the community and helps them in their recovery. All of the workers are on disability benefits and that extra money meant a lot to them — even a couple of hundred on that level of income is huge,” Burnham said.

“They were finding great satisfaction and they were very dedicated,”

He said the workers, who have mental health issues, would do two- to four-hour shifts and be paid minimum wage.

Local businesses were also very appreciative of the crew’s efforts to keep the downtown clean, he said.

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.